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sudden deflated status on the oversized painting of Yermak Timofeyevich in the blue room. Who could think straight with that madman foraging across the thick layers of cheap industrial-grade paint? Heavy with winter blues, browns, and flat winter light, Yermak leads a band of Cossacks through a river. They are hacking their way through the line of Tatar defenders. The long creases on his forehead suggest a lifetime of weariness, of hunger, but the look in his eye is of wild joy. All this in spite of the heavy armour he wears—a gift from the mad Tsar. Would he have still worn that armour if he had known that some day its weight would drag him to the bottom of a river? Is he pleased to know that even now on certain days columns of fire shoot out of the river at the very spot his bones are pinned to the riverbed? These were the questions Tanya made the mistake of voicing aloud. And in front of a group of schoolchildren.

    This must be why the painting of Yermak was so big, she'd told the children. Yermak was larger than life, daily fighting death in that large river that flowed out the bottom border, as if to show no mere frame could ever contain him. Yes, it was a big painting. Beyond big, the canvas was an immensity. It filled an entire wall in the museum. If it were to fall, if those hooks and cables were to fail, the weight of the painting would surely pull down the wall to the waxed floor. The toppling wall would set off a chain reaction, she speculated aloud, and as each wall fell, room by room, the upper stories would collapse like an accordion folding upon the lower storeys. Yermak would drag
down the entire museum all the way to the basement, burying them all.

    Naturally, there were complaints. She was demoted. Her embarrassment, colossal. Worse, sitting in the basement next to boxes of rocks and other curiosities put her no closer to Yuri than before, but rather much further away. And this is what hurt her most. She, a girl made of water and air and breath, she a girl who had swallowed cloud and was now more vapour and spirit than girl, was stuck in the underlit bowels of the stagnant museum at the very bottom of the bottom of the ocean of air.
    Yuri's voice and that of Zoya's, Tanya's replacement, floated down opposite sets of stairs, Yuri's from the west wing and Zoya's from the east. Even separated, through the acoustic anomalies of the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, they managed to find each other, their words falling to the lowest point of the building, settling in the wells of Tanya's ears: Zoya discussing in her bored monotone the icons of Saints Boris and Gleb, while Yuri fielded questions from the purple room where the two pictures of Yermak opening the Siberian interior hung.
    'Why does Yermak look so rabid?' The question tumbled down the staircase and fell loudly at Tanya's feet.
    'Well,' Yuri coughed politely, 'he was a known river pirate. Ivan the Terrible hired him to go and act crazy in a grand proportion, an ability so natural to Cossacks, it seems a genetic certainty.'
    A true interpretation. But risky. It was OK to criticize dead people, but not overly famous ones. Having spent the better part of a summer in the basement, Tanya ought to know. She studied the window, the particulate texture of lowering frost mixed with the grit and pollution. This time of year the rose and lavenders of the grainy air looked like a picture of a famous painting she'd seen in a book somewhere. Viewed up close, there were nothing but dots, hundreds upon hundreds of dots. But seen from a distance, out of the haze of dots a rolling green and a river, and a child and a woman with a red parasol slowly emerged. He must have lived in a very dirty world, that painter. But he found a way, with the point of his paintbrush and unbounded human patience, to render it beautiful. Tanya narrowed her eyes at the grainy block of sky framed in the window. Dots upon dots. She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them suddenly.